Cecile Richards was, according to her mother, a beautiful but fussy baby. To get her to nap on weekends, her parents would drive from their home in Dallas to Austin, where they would meet up with their political buddies at Scholz Garten, a beer hall that was a gathering place for the lawyers, politicians, journalists, and gadflies who comprised the state capital’s progressive scene.
Her father, David, was a rising star in liberal legal circles, defending civil rights leaders, unions like the International Brotherhood of Teamsters, and people who were accused of being communists amid the tumultuous cultural changes of the 1960s. The family never quite fit in in Dallas, a place her father described as “a pinched-up, buttoned-down wasteland for the soul.” When Richards’s sixth-grade teacher questioned her on why she refused to say the Lord’s Prayer with her class after they recited the Pledge of Allegiance, she replied: “We don’t read the Bible in our house.” Her parents, who attended the progressive Unitarian Church, “weren’t particularly religious folks,” Richards later recalled.
The family soon moved to Austin, an island of liberalism in conservative Texas, where her parents embraced the hippie ethos of the era. Ann ordered hundreds of ladybugs to grow a pesticide-free garden. Richards, her siblings, and their friends stuffed envelopes for political candidates at the dining room table and watched as liberal stalwarts like the columnist Molly Ivins acted out the Watergate hearings by the pool with their parents. David was, as Richards would later remember, always “the smartest guy in the room and the center of attention.”
But as David fought to create a more liberal Texas, it was Ann who was home taking care of Richards and her siblings. Her brilliant, hilarious mother carried baby Cecile to early NAACP meetings in Dallas and pushed her around in her stroller, canvassing Black and Latino neighborhoods for Democratic candidates.
It was Ann who took Richards to swimming class and Girl Scouts. Who sewed her baby clothes and her Halloween costumes and made dinner. Who created massive Easter egg hunts and made chocolate meringue pie to celebrate special days. Who took Richards to Scarborough’s to buy new wool, midcalf A-line skirts for college and organized raucous group campouts across Texas so she could experience the beauty and diversity of her home state.
It was Ann who Richards told when she was disciplined by the principal after wearing a black armband—made of felt scavenged from her mother’s sewing kit—to school as part of a day of national protest of the Vietnam War. How dare that principal “intimidate you just for standing up for what you believe?” Ann fumed that evening. The feeling, Richards later recalled, was “exhilarating,” like they were fighting for justice, mother and daughter together.
And in 1972, it was Ann who started campaigning for Sarah Weddington, the twenty-seven-year-old lawyer who had just argued Roe at the Supreme Court, cluttering the dining room table with canvassing plans to get her elected to the state legislature. The position on her campaign was the first professional action of Ann’s adult life she’d taken without David—but not without Richards, a teenager just about a dozen years younger than Weddington herself, who helped to phone bank and door-knock. Richards watched as Weddington’s primary opponent called her “that sweet little girl” instead of using her name and complained that she was trying to confuse the voters; one day she would wear her hair up, the next day she would wear her hair down.
Weddington won anyway. Roe was decided thirteen days after she was sworn in. Female political power, and the whole project of women’s equality, seemed bound up with abortion rights. Ann took a job as Weddington’s legislative office manager at the state capitol, working outside the house for the first time in nearly two decades. After years of watching her mother run their family, Richards saw her run something bigger. Suddenly, it seemed like Ann could do anything.
Ann was, in many ways, a woman of her era, coming into her own professionally at the same time as Gloria Steinem and Shirley Chisholm and Billie Jean King. These women represented a second wave of feminism, one that expanded the work of their foremothers, who fought for women to have the right to vote. Abortion rights became a central part of their fight for equality. Equal rights for women were not the legal rationale of the Roe decision, which was based in a right to privacy and personal liberty rooted in the Fourteenth Amendment. But Americans understood the decision in terms of equality and new freedoms for women.
Women’s lives were changing, and Richards was watching her mother ride that wave. In 1975, Ann was recruited to run for the Democratic nomination for county commissioner, after David turned down the chance to run. She feared that if she ran and won, it would end her marriage. She did it anyway.
When Richards left for Brown University, seeking a chance to see beyond Texas, her parents were married and her mom was home. By the time she graduated in 1980, her mother was an elected official and a rising feminist star. Her parents were divorcing, and her mother would soon enter rehab in Minnesota for alcoholism. The new feminism hadn’t just roiled the country, it had transformed Richards’s family. Women’s liberation had remade her mother’s destiny, put her on track to become something more influential. And the way such big political changes could reshape women’s lives became a foundational story not just for Ann but for her daughter as well.
After college, Richards became an itinerant union organizer, camping out in her car and traveling from New Orleans to Los Angeles to the Rio Grande Valley, organizing campaigns for garment workers, nursing-home workers, and janitors. In 1981, her mother called her home to help with her next campaign, a run for state treasurer, where she was battling criticism that a woman could not handle the state’s money. Richards traveled the state in her car and was so good, Ann boasted, that her campaign got an editorial endorsement in a town she had never visited.
By 1988, Ann had become so admired for her political instincts and quick wit that she was chosen to deliver the keynote address at the Democratic National Convention in Atlanta—the second woman to be selected for that slot. Her speech—in which she famously described Vice President George H. W. Bush, the Republican presidential nominee, as “born with a silver foot in his mouth”—turned her into a political icon. As Ann basked in the applause that night, she wrapped an arm behind a beaming Richards, standing onstage by her side smiling in a bright yellow dress.
When her mom ran for governor in 1990, Richards was married to Kirk Adams, another union organizer, and raising their toddler, Lily, in Los Angeles, where the couple were hired to organize the most important union campaign of their lives. But Ann called and Richards packed her life in Venice Beach into a U-Haul and drove home to help her mom once more.
The gubernatorial race was a match between two larger-than-life Texas characters. Ann Richards was a big-haired, wisecracking grandmother who defied the expectations for stay-at-home mothers. Clayton Williams was a conservative cowboy businessman rich from oil, banking, and cattle, who promised to return the state to its traditional ways—“to make Texas great again,” he said. It was a clash of values between the ol’ boys’ Texas and the “new Texas” that Ann described on the campaign trail, a place that empowered women and Black and Hispanic voters. A choice not only of politics and policies, but over changing roles for American women.
Like Todd Akin in 2012, Williams roiled his campaign with a comment about rape. Sitting around a fire with reporters he had invited to his cattle ranch, he compared the heavy fog enveloping the campsite to the violent sex crime. “If it’s inevitable, just relax and enjoy it,” said Williams, taking a bite of beans from a blue tin cup. It was “just a joke,” he said later, when questioned later about the remark by the reporters, adding, “that’s not a Republican women’s club that we were at this morning.”
Ann cast him as a pig from the past. “Rape is not a joke. It is a crime of violence,” she told a gathering of Democratic women. “It is time we had a governor in the state of Texas who recognized that women are not cattle, that they are not there for servicing.”
At the time, the joke was considered uncouth but not that uncommon. The comment barely dented his chances, and Williams still led Ann by fifteen points almost six months after the remark. His real trouble started after he refused to release his taxes, telling a reporter that he paid nothing in 1986, the year of the oil bust that cost hundreds of thousands of Texans their jobs. “The guy’s a Donald Trump in a cowboy hat, selling one failing business to shore up another,” Ann’s campaign manager Mary Beth Rogers said, a reference to the high-profile financial collapse of the then New York real estate developer. On Election Night, Texans agreed: They backed Ann by 49 to 47 percent.
Suddenly, Ann became the most powerful elected woman in America. Richards saw firsthand how women’s equality, and the inherent right to abortion she believed it included, could conquer even in Texas. “My name is Ann Richards, and I am pro-choice and I vote,” her mother declared at the party’s national convention in 1992.
Her victory was a harbinger of new power for Democratic women. During Ann’s first year in office, Americans were riveted to their television screens, watching the fourteen white men of the Senate Judiciary Committee interrogate Anita Hill, a Black law professor who alleged that Clarence Thomas, President George H. W. Bush’s nominee to the Supreme Court, had sexually harassed her. Only two women served in the US Senate then—one Republican, one Democrat—and neither was on the committee.
Women responded by running for office in droves in 1992, determined to transform Washington, and they won. The number of women in the Senate tripled to six. Forty-seven women won House seats, a new record for female representation in the chamber. Media outlets declared “the Year of the Woman.” Nearly all these new women were Democrats and supported abortion rights. Any antiabortion agenda seemed gutted after the election, especially after the Supreme Court’s ruling that year in Casey.
A new president, Bill Clinton, nominated Ruth Bader Ginsburg to be the second woman and sixth Jewish justice of the Supreme Court. Abortion restrictions, Ginsburg told the Senate during her confirmation hearings, treated women “as less than a fully adult human responsible for her own choices.” In her new Supreme Court chambers, she put a silver mezuzah on the doorframe, the first ever affixed by a justice.
Hillary Rodham Clinton, the lawyer and powerhouse who helped drive her husband’s successful campaign to the White House, predicted the moment was the start of lasting change. “We’ll have a woman president by 2010,” she told an audience in Los Angeles. She may not have been elected herself, but she was the most visible embodiment of the spirit of the moment: a Yale-educated, liberal feminist, who graduated from law school the year Roe was decided. She rode into Washington from Arkansas making no excuses for her staunch support of abortion rights.
But something shifted by the time Ann Richards ran for reelection just two years later in 1994. She lost to George W. Bush. He wasn’t the only Republican who won: in Washington that same election, a “Republican revolution” delivered unified control of Congress to the GOP for the first time in more than four decades. A different political force had risen, one Richards had not seen coming.
There had been a clue. A few weeks before the end of her mother’s reelection campaign in 1994, Richards traveled to a plant gate in Beaumont to hand campaign flyers out to factory workers. What she heard startled her: union guys attacked her mother as a “baby-killer” who plotted to take away their guns. These were the same kinds of guys Richards once organized. But now, they were mobilized by a new movement—the Christian Coalition. These right-wing religious conservatives were determined to remake the country with cultural appeals aimed squarely at undercutting the secular, liberal version of Texas that Ann and her family had spent decades trying to build. The New Texas, it turned out, was something else entirely. More conservative. More Christian. And it wasn’t just Texas.
Richards saw a national threat: the conservative Christian backlash to the Democratic female victories had become a force feminists could not ignore. She started her own organization, the Texas Freedom Network, to push back on conservative Christian pastors who sought to influence public school curriculums by banning books, teaching Bible stories about Earth’s creation alongside the scientific theory of evolution, and promoting abstinence-only sex education. When George W. Bush ran for president in 2000, Richards warned that feminists and abortion- rights advocates would be foolhardy to ignore the Christian right. “We think their ideas are goofy, so we think no one’s going to listen to them,” she said that year, addressing a conference on the future of the women’s movement in Baltimore. “But look at the Christian Coalition. They showed what a well-organized minority can do when they put their mind to it.” If the feminist movement could be as politically involved as the conservative Christians were, she said, “we will win.”
Richards moved to Washington, becoming a top aide to Nancy Pelosi charged with rallying liberal forces behind the lawmaker who, as House minority whip, occupied the highest leadership position ever held by a woman in Congress. After that, she founded America Votes, a coalition that coordinated the political activities of the richest, most influential unions and liberal advocacy groups for the 2004 elections. Her work was getting noticed: “She could be the president,” Pelosi would later tell The New Yorker.
Richards chose a different path. When she took over Planned Parenthood in 2006, Richards saw an opportunity to give the feminist movement the political power to push back against the religious right. They had a lot of work to do. The antiabortion forces had made significant gains after Bush won and now championed their cause from the White House. Yet their problems weren’t limited to Republicans. When Bush signed legislation banning so-called partial-birth abortion, he had support from seventeen Democratic senators who defied the opposition from Planned Parenthood to vote for the bill. Democratic leaders openly recruited Democratic candidates who opposed abortion rights, arguing they would be better positioned to win in more conservative states. “We’re the very best at what we do, providing reproductive health care for women,” Jill June, the head of Planned Parenthood in Iowa, told Richards when she interviewed before the hiring committee that year. “But we keep losing ground in the political arena.” The board wanted someone to transform the ninety-year-old women’s health care provider into, as Richards would later say, “the largest kick-butt political organization.”
Building stronger political support wouldn’t be easy. But Richards—the sixth leader in the organization’s history and the only one without a background in women’s health—saw an opportunity. Planned Parenthood’s hundreds of clinics served nearly three million people annually. One in five women had visited one of its offices. The majority came not for an abortion but for birth control pills, HIV tests, or breast cancer screenings. Richards would convert those patients into political activists who would help build popular support for their cause. “The most important thing that we had to do as an organization was match up our incredible health care footprint in all 50 states with an engaged movement in these states,” she said.
To start, she would organize voters to block abortion restrictions at state legislatures. “No one gets up every morning and thinks about the Supreme Court,” Richards told The Dallas Morning News shortly after Bush elevated Samuel Alito to become the newest member of the highest court. “But everybody has a legislature, and everybody knows that legislature has an enormous impact on every aspect of our lives.” Her first major test came just three weeks after she started, when South Dakota’s Republican governor signed the nation’s most sweeping abortion ban since Roe, criminalizing the procedure unless a woman’s life was jeopardized. She launched a petition campaign so voters could directly overturn it at the ballot box through a referendum, and won, by a margin of twelve points.
When Ann died, less than a year after Richards took the position, the loss was devastating to Richards and symbolic for the country. “She ultimately was my mentor, I suppose, in addition to being my mom,” Richards would later say. If her mother’s life was the story of women winning abortion rights in America, Richards’s would become the story of the fight to protect them.
WHEN THE OBAMA administration swept into Washington in 2009, Richards saw an opportunity to advance her mission. She lobbied for the president’s new health care bill, beating back the sixty-four antiabortion Democrats in Congress—nearly one-quarter of the Democratic majority—who wanted it to include a ban on abortion coverage. When the bill passed, Richards believed they had made history. The legislation prevented insurance companies from considering pregnancies preexisting conditions, added birth control to the list of mandatory services insurers had to offer, and covered a fleet of preventive services like mammograms. It wasn’t everything they wanted; shortly after entering the White House, Obama said pushing for a law protecting abortion rights by codifying Roe into federal law—a promise he made to Planned Parenthood during his campaign—wasn’t his “highest legislative priority.” But the health care law was the kind of political victory that occurs only once in a generation. “A big fucking deal,” as Joe Biden infamously put it as he leaned a little too close to the microphone at the signing ceremony.
Two years later, Richards notched a second high-profile victory, one that exposed the creeping guerrilla tactics of her adversaries. After Republicans won control of the House in 2010, they launched an investigation into whether Planned Parenthood was using federal funds for abortion services, a practice banned by the Hyde Amendment. Soon after, the prominent breast cancer charity Susan G. Komen for the Cure announced that it would no longer give money to any group under federal, state, or local investigation. The only grantee that fit that description was Planned Parenthood, which received annual funding for breast cancer screenings. It was a coup for the antiabortion movement, which had targeted Komen for underwriting breast cancer screenings at Planned Parenthood clinics for years.
Nancy Brinker, Komen’s founder and chief executive, insisted the decision had nothing to do with abortion. She asked Richards to keep the policy change quiet to avoid controversy, Richards later recounted in her memoir. “We don’t want to make a big deal of this,” Richards recalled Brinker saying. “It would be better if it were just understood between us.” Instead, Richards blasted the news to her million-strong email list, asking their backers to help make up the funds. Planned Parenthood’s supporters took to the internet to express their anger, firing off 1.3 million posts on Twitter mentioning the issue. Within four days, Planned Parenthood raised four times as much for its breast cancer program as it would have received from Komen’s annual grant that year—nearly $3 million in total. Komen, meanwhile, saw a drop of $77 million—about 22 percent of the foundation’s income—in contributions and sponsorships.
Richards used the victory to cement an image of Planned Parenthood that defied the caricature drawn by its opponents. Over and over, she pounded a message that most services offered by Planned Parenthood are universally supported procedures like cancer screenings—exactly the kind of work championed by Komen. Planned Parenthood was about women’s health care, she stressed, not just abortion. She skillfully refocused the ire on her real enemies. “My issue was not with Komen,” she told The Dallas Morning News. “The same people yelling at women outside our health centers were the same folks urging boycotts of their walks and turning the screws on them, finally pushing them over the edge.”
Just weeks after the Komen uproar, Richards faced off with her adversaries directly. Catholic bishops were objecting to a part of Obama’s health care law that required religious charities, hospitals, and universities to pay for contraception for their employees. Richards argued against an exemption to the rule to White House aides. After a fierce lobbying campaign, Richards won for a third time. Contraception would be free in the new health care law. “No matter how much birth control Planned Parenthood provided, and we were probably the biggest in terms of a health care provider, it meant anyone could get it,” said Richards. It was, she thought, “a radical change.” Richards was thrilled when Obama called her himself to announce the news. “I’m making three phone calls today: the Catholic bishops, the Catholic Hospital Association, and you,” Richards said Obama told her. “Suffice it to say, I think yours is going to be the happiest phone call I’m going to make.” It was the proudest moment of Richards’s career.
Even as the Catholic groups took their case to the courts, the victory showed the influence Planned Parenthood held in Obama’s Washington. Planned Parenthood was no longer a liability, the Obama campaign realized. It could be a political weapon. Internal polling commissioned by White House political aides found the organization to be more trusted than the Democrats, Congress, and the White House. Richards was the campaign’s most important surrogate for the 2012 presidential race, outside of the vice president and First Lady, David Plouffe, Obama’s political strategist, told aides. Obama’s political operation asked her to take a leave of absence to campaign full-time for his reelection bid.
Weeks before Election Day, Richards stood in the wings at the second presidential debate and was thrilled to hear Obama mention Planned Parenthood from the stage for the first time in history. Not once. Not twice. But five times. Obama didn’t use the word abortion, and he offered no clear promises to expand abortion access, even as the wave of restrictive laws swept statehouses. But Planned Parenthood, the president implied, was a trusted health care provider, not the corrupt abortion peddler that its opponents on Capitol Hill and in churches across the country described. To Richards, it felt like power. In just six years, they had “cracked the code” in the Democratic Party, she thought.
On Inauguration Day, Richards stood on the inaugural platform with the most important Democratic officials, looking out over the crowds stretching to the Washington Monument, to witness Obama’s second swearing in. It was, she believed, a moment for celebration. The antiabortion movement was losing ground. The Republicans had imploded over Akin’s “legitimate rape” language, and party officials were running away from the religious right. In Mississippi, one of the most antiabortion states in the country, a ballot measure to grant constitutional rights to a fetus from conception failed.
Planned Parenthood could claim some measure of responsibility for these wins: the Supreme Court’s 2010 ruling in Citizens United v. FEC opened the door to unlimited political spending from advocacy groups, and Richards had taken advantage. Planned Parenthood’s political operation poured nearly $12 million into campaigns for Democratic candidates—more than fourteen times what it had spent just four years earlier and four times more than the Susan B. Anthony List, which spent less than $3 million. Shortly after his second term began, Obama became the first sitting president to address Planned Parenthood’s national conference—a thank-you gift delivered after winning reelection. The antiabortion activists had state laws, but Richards had the president and the Supreme Court.
Still, Richards hadn’t fully seen the possibilities in her deep-red home state. Not until that night under the rotunda with Wendy Davis.
Hours after Davis and Richards celebrated in the capitol, Republicans called another special session to try one more time to pass the twenty-week abortion ban. And once again, Richards and Davis were ready. They rallied outside the Capitol and crisscrossed the state to energize supporters in orange buses nicknamed “Ann” after Richards’s mother and “Maggie” after Margaret Sanger, the founder of Planned Parenthood.
Feminist writers heralded a “Wendy Davis nation,” where abortion rights would motivate Democratic voters. An internet meme circulated showing Davis as Daenerys Targaryen from Game of Thrones with a dragon on her shoulder: “In the game of Texas Senate, you either filibuster or Republicans own your uterus,” it read. Progressives in Texas saw the start of a rebirth, a wave of activism that could lift them back into power.
Days before the second vote, Richards hosted a rowdy party in Washington called Sex, Politics, and Cocktails. Hundreds of young supporters, joined by several dozen members of Congress, sipped their drinks in the airy atrium of the Newseum. They chuckled about the party favors: hundreds of condoms with wrappers that read PROPER ATTIRE: REQUIRED FOR ENTRY.
Liberal women believed they were watching democracy at work. They believed Davis would win. A new Texas and a new America were here.
BUT THEY LOST.
The second vote on the Texas abortion ban happened less than three weeks after the first. This time, Davis could not run out the clock, because Republicans introduced it early in the session. Democrats tried to add exceptions for rape and incest into the legislation. They failed. After all the yelling, the organizing, and the protesting, the final vote—19–11—remained nearly unchanged from the first. On the day that the governor signed the law, Planned Parenthood announced that three of its Texas clinics would close. Republican lawmakers cast Richards’s protesters as unruly renegades trying to take over the capitol and overpower an elected majority doing the work of the people. In Texas, the law was popular, particularly with Republicans. Concern about the threat to abortion rights faded away as liberal America moved on to the next outrage.
Still, Richards believed in the power of what she witnessed in her home state. Her people would keep fighting. Organizing, protesting, and shifting public opinion: that was how they would strengthen abortion rights and roll back these laws, she believed. “It’s not enough, in this area, to just be great at what you do. You have to back it up with people,” she said. And in Texas, they had. Along with Davis, her movement had shown the nation what was at stake with all these new abortion bans and restrictions. And as far as Richards could tell, the country had been riveted by their fight. In deeply conservative Texas, she thought, they’d “woken up a sleeping giant.”